You'll want a PC with Intel's new chip for the battery life alone

Intel's latest chip, the 4th generation Core processor code-named Haswell, will take a 6-hour battery and make it last for 9 hours.

Intel's latest chip, its 4th generation Core processor code-named Haswell, will take a 6 hour battery and make it last for 9 hours.

The 4th generation Core may be the first chip from Intel that can extend—in a single generation— PC battery life by 50%.

Intel built energy savings into earlier chips, but Haswell is a redesign of its PC chip and was created from the ground up with low power utilization in mind, said Nathan Brookwood, a chip industry analyst at insight64.

It's taken five years to produce Haswell, the time it takes to redesign a chip, said Brookwood. "It takes a while, and it has taken a while, but I think they are there," said Brookwood of the new power economies in Haswell.

The Haswell chip will be released early next month.

One of the design techniques used for reducing energy consumption as well as boosting performance, involves graphics.

Intel added more graphics hardware to run processes in parallel. By doing so, the chip can operate at lower clock speeds, said Brookwood.

Intel says Haswell will double the graphics performance on laptops.

The 22-nanometer chip can turn transistors on and off as it dynamically adjusts power usage. Faster interconnects to speed data flows, reducing the amount of time the chip spends processing data, is another improvement.

Haswell arrives at precipitous time for the PC industry.

IDC said Tuesday that it expects worldwide shipments of personal computers to fall by 7.8% this year. Reasons for the declining shipments include a still-struggling economy, along with increasing reliance on other mobile platforms.

Shane Rau, an analyst at IDC, doesn't believe that Haswell alone can help the PC. But the chip combined with other things soon to arrive will provide a boost to the PC market, he added.

For instance, by next year PC makers will be producing the fourth generation of ultrabooks, and the building blocks for a strong product have been coming into place, he said.

Along with the improved battery life, Rau said touch capability will become more ubiquitous in laptops, and the devices will be increasingly lighter, thinner, and more durable and affordable than today's PCs.